Remember that if you ran afoul of Google’s incomprehensibly capricious policy application for Google Profiles – the same policies that appear to be punishing more people using their real names than people using pseudonyms – you had an opportunity to appeal? Well, say good-bye to that option, because the administrative sanction chute has now been greased.
I’m going to talk about names. The same is also true for service infractions, I understand, so fill in the blanks.
If challenged you now have four days to satisfy Google with a name that whoever is handling your case likes. A name you have documentation for. A name that fits into the ‘First Name/Last Name’ model (even if you’re from a culture whose names don’t work that way). A name that Google doesn’t think infringes on the name of a famous person. A name that Google doesn’t think is unlikely or silly (even if your parents ‘blessed’ you with something really quite awful).
Four days to pick a name – whether or not it is the name you are commonly known by – that makes Google happy. Until the next time they challenge you, when you might have to change it again. Apparently there’s no limitation on the number of times Google might decide to take a disliking to your name, even if Google previously approved it, and you showed it government ID with that name on it.
Four days, with no opportunity to appeal. Then you lose these services:
- Google Plus
- Google Plus One
- Google Profile
- Google Reader
- Feedburner
- Picasa
- Google Buzz
Why do you lose access to all of these services? Because they’ve all been reworked to operate around Google Profile – and once your Google Profile is shut down or deleted, you lose all of the others. There’s unconfirmed talk that you’ll also lose access to your Android apps, including the ones you paid for.
Hands up everyone who thinks that Google isn’t intending to make Google Profile an integral part of its other services. This list is just what you lose in four days time if you cannot satisfy Google.
[...] Google eliminates appeals option for names and service infractions Remember that if you ran afoul of Google’s incomprehensibly capricious policy application for Google Profiles – the same policies that appear to be punishing more people using their real names than people using pseudonyms – you had an opportunity… Source: dwellonit.taterunino.net [...]
I’ve been in an email discussion with folks about this. It seems Google in part is covering their own ass thusly:
The original suspension system seemed to intuitively invite users to open up a dialog with Google and try to reasonably explain their situation. It also resulted in back-and-forth emails with a (presumably) human support staff member.
But, that resulted in two problems: users were lulled into believing Google actually wanted to work with them to allow them to use Plus the way they really need to, and it placed individual policy reps in the sticky position of being pushed to define (or softly re-define) policy in one-on-one conversations with users.
The general consensus is that this is why the suspension experience of individuals was so different – some users got a stonewalled form letter response and were tossed in the “black hole” if they dared to challenge it, other users got a more human reply and even got re-instated after providing some links to prove they used their identity around the web.
Overall, despite the “courtesy” of the 4 day grace window, the overall process seems more automated and cold.
El Goog taketh, and they… taketh away some more.
And for that reason I won’t create a G+ profile. It’s bad enough being a place your not really wanted (facebook) but I have so much tied up to google, that I just won’t risk it.
Are you sure? I seem to still have an appeal option, linking to this page:
https://www.google.com/support/profiles/bin/request.py?hl=en&contact_type=name_appeal
I thought I was sure, certainly. However, I’m not convinced that that isn’t a hangover from the old process.
Under this policy, it’s clearly foolhardy to get too wrapped up in any particular G+ account — least of all, one bearing one’s “real name.” Rather, the sensible approach is to “invite” oneself to a whole bunch of pseudonyms, to have spares at the ready for whenever Google decides they don’t like how one looks.
Interesting that Google would go out of its way to craft a policy promoting the creation of griefer alts.
I have said it elsewhere, I’m going to say it again:
I have a feeling Google just think this psuedonyms and non-Western-style-names issue is going to “go away” if they simply keep refusing to budge long enough. Unfortunately for them, I don’t think it IS going to go away, and is simply going to become an even bigger issue the longer it goes on. In fact, I wouldn’t be one jot surprised if there doesn’t eventually come of this some laws being passed making wallet-name-only policies totally illegal, and in fact I did see some expert opinion being blogged saying something exactly like that not too long after all this started.
I also think Google are going to find they’re doing far more lasting damage to themselves than they can possibly imagine, something that might take them *years* to recover from, assuming they ever *DO* recover from it.
Someone needs to inject a ton of money into the development of Diaspora. Yesterday.
Seems I need to find a new email provider in time – the roadmap seems obvious enough :/
Armin
Well, at least Google can be credited with making Microsoft seem like a warm and friendly company.
As I understood it, people are finding that they don’t just lose access to these services but that in many cases all their data is deleted as well, despite Google’s previous commitment to the idea that you could move it out of the service if you wanted to. I quit G+ a while ago because in the process of suspensions, people were also loosing access to their Gmail and Gchat services, which I had long grown used to and a little too dependent on.
@ Nathan, I agree that the controversy will not go away, but will only get bigger and more general over time. I don’t share your optimism that laws will be on the side of the consumers of internet services, though. Apart from the recent move by S. Korea, almost every lawmaking body I’ve heard of seems aimed in precisely the opposite direction – making it easier for authorities to find you, track your activities online, or even ban you without due process from internet access. The recent riots and protests in the UK and San Francisco are cases in point. The PM in the UK is calling for the ability to shut off wireless service in case of disturbances (really dumb! what about all the nonparticipants who might need to make emergency messages?) and the BART stations in SF *did* cut off service during the planned protests there.
Oh, did I forget to mention that? Yes – if your profile goes, every comment, posting, or whatever for each of these services disappears as well, as if it had never happened.
@ Tateru, how is this supposed to support their vaunted Social Accountability ™ marketing spiel? If someone just deletes their profile, all public record of their words vanishes. They are then able to make another free Google account, sign up for + again, and there won’t even be a readily available sample of prior postings to identify their dialect pattern.
Apparently losing your Google+ account could also cause your Android tablet services to stop working. Something that people have payed $$$ for. I wonder if that could result in a class action lawsuit.
On the other hand… I find myself thinking of LL, and the way they keep replacing the man in charge on a periodic basis when whatever things he’d been doing didn’t pan out well for SL… and I wonder: What if this Plusgate thing causes Google so much harm that, like SL, they sack the one or ones at the top who adamantly insisted on this wallet-names policy, and replace him or them with someone who goes 180% the other way? It looks like people are starting to pull out of Google services altogether, and telling them as much. What if this becomes a huge trend and thousands upon thousands of people cancel all their Google services (Gmail, Buzz, Blogger, Picasa, etc.) and tell Google, quite graphically, what they can go do with themselves?
In any event, it sounds like there’s a showdown building. There are enough people and outfits out there with lots of eyeballs focused on them who are raising major ire about those who want to eliminate internet privacy, anonymity, pseudonymity, and related things. While it appears Plusgate is what sparked it off, it seems to go well beyond just what Google is doing and is focusing on all things of this nature.
If a vast enough part of the general, tech-savvy population, upon seeing what ALL the various Powers That Be want to do to their rights online (the loss of anonymity, the loss of pseudonymity, or even the very loss of internet access altogether), stand up and say “This is totally unacceptable,” then sparks will fly and breakers will flip. I saw a thing recently talking about how it takes only 10% of a population to come to a particular opinion before it tips the scales and soon the vast majority of the population comes to the same conclusion. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110725190044.htm
And on the subject of banning people from accessing the internet, which someone else here brought up in this thread, it IS very interesting that, for anything other than major, serious crimes, the UN is *adamant* that it is a direct violation of *basic* *human* *rights* to take away people’s access to the internet, and I don’t think the UN are going to back down on that.
Any way you slice it, this thing is going to get explosive, and probably change the world forever. And I am not merely talking about Google+ policies here. We’re at a crossroads in history, one where we either lose our freedom to control our OWN identity, or we as a society push back hard against those who would take that freedom away from us. There IS no in between on this!
This is truly shocking. I’m speechless. We’re living truly into a cyberpunk dystopia, where megacorps can do pretty much what they want with civil rights, because they are always covered by the rule “you don’t have to use our services”.
At some point consumers’ rights have been dumped straight into the bin.
I wonder what will happen when Google starts to filter out “dissenting opinions” from their search engines as well…
To be honest, this is something I expect from Zuckerberg every day, but definitely not from Page. Even Microsoft starts to look like a pussy cat in face of this…
Charlie Stross explains why he’s not going to be on Google+, including a list of 40 mistakes programmers make about handling personal names.